PSR-S950

The PSR-S950 workstation keyboard effectively blurs the line between digital and acoustic sound and the result will change your musical perceptions forever. We've recorded professional musicians to achieve authentic renditions of their instruments and playing nuances and now you can play alongside them. The PSR-S950's other incredible features—including Vocal Harmony 2 and Super Articulation for thrilling instrumental and vocal support—will add a whole new perspective to your creativity.

The Yamaha PSR-S950 is packed with amazing voices, styles and comprehensive features to help you create, arrange, perform and record your music in any genre.
Yamaha's cutting edge sound innovation takes a step further with "Audio Styles." Audio Styles give your performance greater expressive potential by adding real audio drum and percussion parts to Yamaha’s Guitar Enhanced Style engine.
Additionally, the built-in FlashROM lets you load new Voices and Style Expansions (VSE) from around the world.

Features

Just play to experience incredibly realistic and expressive sound

Acoustic instrument articulations, nuances and dynamics are challenging to reproduce. As the world's largest musical instrument manufacturer, Yamaha has perfected both the science and art of this process to bring you the most sophisticated, musical-sound...

Audio & Video

News & Events

Yamaha has announced ‘The Key Advantage’, a series of six iBooks providing a new way for piano customers to engage with Yamaha and find out everything there is to know about all aspects of the Yamaha Piano range.

Yamaha dealers are hosting a very special event featuring international product specialist Bert Smorenburg and the new PSR-S950 workstation keyboard.

Features

Just play to experience incredibly realistic and expressive sound

Acoustic instrument articulations, nuances and dynamics are challenging to reproduce. As the world's largest musical instrument manufacturer, Yamaha has perfected both the science and art of this process to bring you the most sophisticated, musical-sounding and easy-to-play instrument Voices.

Super Articulation (SA) voices

Super Articulation voices reproduce the performance characteristics of acoustic instruments so authentically, you'll feel as if you're playing the real thing. Best of all, SA voices intelligently add the right expressive nuances to your performance without having to learn complicated control techniques - just play!

Mega Voice style technology

Mega Voices feature various playing techniques and performance sounds like guitar and bass finger slides, brass falls, vocal effects, etc. When used in Styles, Mega Voices provide some of the most realistic sounding and dynamic accompaniments.

Powerful, pro-quality accompaniment available at the touch of a button

Playing a style is like being the conductor of a band that always plays the chords and arrangements you tell them to play. The PSR-S950 has a huge collection of 408 built-in dynamic styles.
Yamaha styles are created by the world's best programmers and mixed by professional studio engineers to ensure unparalleled quality.

Audio Styles

Audio Styles take one step further by adding an audio recording of studio drummers, percussionists and percussion ensembles playing in various studios around the world. This adds the natural feel, ambience and warmth to the drum and percussion parts of the style, giving your performance greater expressive potential. Yamaha Time Stretch Technology allows the audio to follow your tempo changes without changing pitch, so everything stays in perfect sync.

Guitar-Enhanced Styles with Mega Voices

Guitar-Enhanced Styles not only reproduce the sound of guitar playing, they reproduce the actual chord voicings used by guitar players. This adds to the overall realism of the style.

Vocal features create new levels of entertainment and productivity

Whether you sing for fun, enjoy karaoke or are a singer/songwriter, the PSR-S950 provides everything you need to perform or write. Just plug in your mic and sing!

Vocal Cancel

A powerful Vocal Cancel function effectively cancels or suppresses signals like vocals and solos that exist in the centre mix of an audio file, allowing you to make your own “minus one” track and sing “karaoke” style with just instrumental backing.

Microphone input and Vocal Harmony2

The PSR-S950’s microphone input lets you connect a microphone and sing along with your keyboard performance, song or audio file playback.
With Vocal Harmony, you can sing along with three of your own virtual background vocalists. Vocal Harmony2 takes that a step further with new pitch recognition and stability controls. A convenient real-time Mic Level indicator is included in the main display, and a new intuitive graphic user interface makes it easy to experiment with your own mic settings, effects and harmony types. To get you started, PSR-S950 includes 44 exciting Vocal Harmony presets, including male, voices, female voices and sound effect settings.

Score, Lyrics and Text display

The large LCD display can show lyrics, music notation or text. You can even display this information on an external monitor.

Yamaha’s renowned audio and DSP technology provides great live and recorded sound

In music production, the key to creating great sound is in the way the song is mixed. The mixing console lets you mix your music like a studio engineer, including balance, panning and professional studio Digital Signal Processing (DSP) borrowed from Yamaha’s renowned professional recording and live sound products.

Real Distortion

Real Distortion effects are based on digital models of classic guitar amplifiers from the 1960's and 1970's. There are also digital models of legendary analog guitar effect pedals. The result meticulously reproduces the frequencies and dynamics of real distortion guitar sounds.

New speakers and speaker enclosures

Digital amplifier

The PSR-S950 features a Yamaha manufactured digital amplifier with a superb signal to noise ratio. Because of its fully digital, highly efficient design, the amp delivers high performance while significantly reducing energy consumption.

Experience the new, versatile high performance audio engine

The PSR-S950 is capable of playing back and recording audio files. It also has a number of audio manipulation features you can use to create “karaoke” style “minus one” tracks in the key and tempo of your choice.
It can also play back audio files from its Multi Pads, great for triggering loops, vocal phrases and sound effects.

MP3 playback

The PSR-S950 conveniently supports MP3 and WAV audio file playback.

Time Stretch and Pitch shift

Left : Time Stretch, Right : Pitch shift

Not all singing voices have the same range. The PSR-S950 can put your favourite song in the key of your choice with a powerful pitch shift feature that lets you change the key without changing the tempo. If you do want to change the tempo, you can use the time stretch feature to slow down or speed up the tempo without changing the pitch.

Audio Link Multi Pad

Audio Link Multi Pad function lets you link your own audio files (sound effects, vocal phrases, and so on), and trigger them from the Pads as you perform.

Audio Recording

Record your songs and performances as high-quality, uncompressed WAV files to share online or burn to a CD. Connect a microphone or guitar to the instrument and enjoy recording a guitar and keyboard performance together, or record your singing along with song playback.

Voice and Style Expandability keeps your instrument up-to-date

Voice and Style Expansion ensures your instrument can always be updated with new high-quality voices and styles from around the world. Best of all, you can sample many of these expansions for free at: http://services.music.yamaha.com/vse/

Voice and Style Expansion (VSE)

Thanks to Yamaha’s new Voice & Style Expansion packs, players can take advantage of a wide and ever-increasing selection of voices and styles from around the world. Load them to the PSR-S950's built-in FlashROM (64MB) and instantly play authentic sounds, rhythm and backing in the musical style of your choice.

A Portable keyboard that’s mobile device friendly

The PSR-S950 connects and interacts with your mobile devices and tablets. Plus, Yamaha’s growing number apps for iPhone, iPod and iPad bring new ways to interact with your keyboard.

Aux in

Use the auxiliary line in jacks to play along with apps like Yamaha’s “NoteStar” digital sheet music with real audio backing tracks. Or, just play along with your favorite tunes from your music library.

iPhone/iPod/iPad connectivity

With Yamaha’s i-MX1 MIDI interface for iPhone, iPod and iPad, you can experience a new dimension of MIDI control with apps like Yamaha’s Scale Tuner, Piano Diary or Faders & XY Pad.

Technology

Audio & Video

PSR-S950 Multipad Audiolink Demonstration

PSR-S950 Style Programming Demonstration

PSR-S950 USB Audio Player Demonstration

Yamaha PSR-S950 - Part I

Yamaha PSR-S950 - Part II

Yamaha PSR-S950 - Part III

A brief presentation of some Voices and Styles of the "Celtic" Pack. No talking, just music.

Ivan Ivanic is presenting Voices and Styles of the "Eastern Europe" Pack on PSR-A2000. Serbian, English subtitle.

The Euro Dance Pack takes you straight to the Dance charts. Searching for fresh grooves? Here they are. From very latest DubStep or Electro beats to House and HipHop grooves, relaxed Trance and speedy Techno music and Chart hits-- you will find the widest range of fascinating dance music styles that you have ever heard.

The Euro Dance Pack takes you straight to the Dance charts. Searching for fresh grooves? Here they are. From very latest DubStep or Electro beats to House and HipHop grooves, relaxed Trance and speedy Techno music and Chart hits-- you will find the widest range of fascinating dance music styles that you have ever heard.

World Music Expansion PacksEuropean Collection

Thanks to Yamaha’s new Voice & Style Expansion Packs for the PSR, players can take advantage of a wide selection of regional, ethnic and traditional Voices and Styles. Load them to your PSR and instantly play authentic sounds, rhythm and backing in the musical style of your choice!

The best part is: For European customers, the first Expansion Pack is free!

Owners of the PSR-S950, PSR-S750, PSR-S650 or PSR-A2000 can download the bonus Expansion Packs over the Internet, from http://yamahamusicsoft.com. Yamaha's European Software Team has created 8 highly attractive and authentic Expansion Packs, inspired by musical styles and culture from all over Europe. Hundreds of newly recorded samples, voices and even more styles have been developed based on market research in European countries. These comprehensive voice & style packs offer a complete upgrade to your instrument, giving you the tools to recreate and enjoy the most authentic music from Europe.

Each pack comes with a set of registrations combining the best Samples, Styles, Effects and Solo Voices for an intuitive perfomance.

Expansion Packs for PSR-S950, PSR-S750 and PSR-A2000

NEW! World Music Expansion Pack - Euro Dance

Trendy Dance Styles and impressive Synth Voices that will get you in the groove!

40 Styles, 70 Voices, 80 Registrations / 10 Banks, 1 Midi Demo Song

The Euro Dance Pack takes you straight to the Dance charts. Searching for fresh grooves? Here they are. From very latest DubStep or Electro beats to House and HipHop grooves, relaxed Trance and speedy Techno music and Chart hits– you will find the widest range of fascinating dance music styles that you have ever heard.

NEW! World Music Expansion Pack - Western Europe

The perfect collection of Styles and Voices to play famous music from Western European countries!

40 Styles, 60 Voices, 80 Registrations / 10 Banks, 1 Midi Demo Song

The Western Europe Pack is a kind of successor of Latin + Celtic Pack. It highlights on more Italian Ballroom music, Spanish Flamenco and Pop, Portuguese Fado, French Musette, English Brass Bands, Irish traditional music, Folk music from the Alpes as well as Oberkrain and Scandinavian + German Schlager.

NEW! World Music Expansion Pack - Eastern Europe

A variety of Styles and Voices that are perfect for traditional and pop music in Eastern European countries!

40 Styles, 60 Voices, 80 Registrations, 3 Midi Demo Songs

The Eastern Europe Pack highlights the vivid and lively music styles from Poland, Russia, Czech, Slovakia Croatia and Hungary down to the Balkan countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegowina. Typical music images are Russian Balalaika music, Gypsy music, Balkan Brass Band, traditional music from Czech and Slovaky but also Disco Polo from Poland.

The Celtic / North European Pack puts a strong focus on Celtic and Irish Music and features typical instruments of a Folk band such as Accordion (box), Concertina, Tin Whistle, Low Whistle, Irish Flute, Bagpipes, Fiddle, Bodhran and Cajon. The Style selection offers modern Irish Folk rhythms as well as British Marches and Waltzes, but also includes various rhythms from Scandinavia, Poland, Czech plus German Schlager and styles from the Alpes region.

The Latin / South Europe Pack was inspired by the some of the most popular music genres from Spain, France and Italy. Authentic voices for Flamenco music include Claps, Steps, and Cajon, while a Musette accordion is perfect for traditional French music. A breathtakingly realistic Alto Sax, special drums and guitar make it easy to recreate beloved Italian ballroom songs. New Latin, Musette and Traditional styles have been specially designed for this pack, providing perfect rhythm and accompaniments for the stellar new voices.

The Balkan / East Europe Pack highlights the vivid and lively music styles of the Balkan countries and Greece. The popular sound of Tambura(string instrument from Croatia), an authentic Frula sheppards flute, are included in the pack, in addition to accordion and even Bouzouki, which are all important instruments from this region. A Balkan drumkit and some famous DX11 solo voices complete the set and allow for typical styles like Serbian Sasa, Begin, Rumba, Dvojka and rhythms from Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia and even Greece.

The Oriental / Greece & Turkey Pack offers a variety of essential instrument voices and authentic rhythms for this region. In addition to great Bouzouki variations, solo instruments like Ney, Mey, Kaval, Zurna, Balaban and Klarnet are included as well as stringed Baglama, Kanun and Ud, perfect Yayli string sections and a unique Turkish percussion kit. A wide range of new Turkish styles from traditional to modern and some versatile Greek rhythms support the oriental groove. This comprehensive voice & style pack is a complete upgrade to your instrument, giving you the tools to recreate and enjoy the most authentic music from the Oriental Greek and Turkish regions of Europe.

A collection of essential voices and styles from the Celtic, Latin, Balkan & Oriental Packs. If you want to enjoy the full scope of European music, this Pack is perfect! The Best Of Europe Collection offers a complete set of Celtic Folk Band voices, including Whistles Accordion, Fiddle, Bodhran and Bagpipes.You'll also receive a full Spanish Flamenco Percussion kit, and Musette Accordion, in addition to drums, guitar and an Alto sax that are perfect for typical Italian ballroom music. Additional voices include Tambura, Ethnic flutes, Accordions, Greek Bouzouki, various Turkish instruments and a full Turkish Percussion Kit. The unique collection of styles in this pack covers nearly all areas of Europe, from Ireland to Turkey and Spain.

How to get the Expansion Voices and Styles?

Each customer of PSR-S950, PSR-S750, PSR-S650 or PSR-A2000 can download one first Expansion Pack for free. More Packs will be available for purchase for a reasonable price. Simply go to Yamaha´s downloadshop.